Mariluz Soto
Universidad del Desarrollo
Santiago, Chile
Service design for its human-centred orientation includes bias as a valuable component in co-creation environments. Personal experience, comments, and opinions of consumers, users or customers are essential to know the stories behind the interaction with services. On the other hand, the skills of the facilitator in co-creation play a fundamental role in generating an atmosphere of trust that stimulates and guides the creative process. Therefore, the emotions of those who participate in co-creation emerge according to their previous experiences and their accuracy will be defined according to the facilitator’s ability. This paper is both looking at the theoretical framework related to the role of emotions (Van Gorp & Adams 2012; Ho & Siu 2012; Desmet & Hekkert 2009; McDonagh et. Al 2004) their management and their ability to nudge participants’ experience into the service prototyping environment which is mainly a co-creative process with an embodied learning opportunity.
Emotions have a significant impact on people’s decisions, their perceptions and their relationship with their environment (Soto, Beaulé et al., 2020). Anyhow emotional components of co-creative practices are often overlooked and unacknowledged (Soto et al., 2021) even more likely in organizational and corporate settings. Hence, while social, communication and empathy skills are essential for succeeding in a co-creative process (Miettinen et al., 2014) for all the participants the emphasis still remains more on the outcomes, technical side or practical matters of the workshop.
Empathy is connected with emotion through an experience of interaction and “emotion is key to human connection” (Collins & Collins, 2019: p. 17). Empathy appears naturally as an automatic response to seeing other eyes, people’s gestures and body language also communicate the emotional state, the knowledge of our own emotions helps us to express to others to precise their emotional state to reach a clear understanding (very important to communicate with others), the voice tone and active listening are ways to define the interaction ground and finally, the response as all the previous aspects are an essential part of the two-ways interaction, and as we “read” others concrete and subtle expression the verbal and non-verbal response of that interaction are crucial (Ries, 2018). Therefore, empathy includes all emotional responses and expressions and acting according to that, seems like empathy has emotional lenses which are the first filter or layer to perceive our surroundings.
This article will describe how emotions and co-creation are part of a learning level connected with service prototyping where the body, gestures and emotions are part of the interaction between participants. Services are conceived as the result of a design process, but the process is also a change of the mindset about the service itself. In the service, prototyping process participants have to learn how to see the service from their experience and analyze it with a critical, collaborative and kind perspective to build in a co-creative environment the improvements. The service prototyping perspective is given by the SINCO LAB at the University of Lapland, Finland as the original laboratory with a particular methodology of role-playing through service design and the practice in the DES LAB at Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, which follows the same idea.
References
Collins, T. & Collins, J. (2019). Why Emotions Matter. Beaumont Press
Desmet, P. M., & Hekkert, P. (2009). Special issue editorial: Design & emotion. International Journal of Design, 3(2).
Ho, A. G., & Siu, K. W. M. G. (2012). Emotion design, emotional design, emotionalize design: A review on their relationships from a new perspective. The Design Journal, 15(1), 9-32.
McDonagh, D., Hekkert, P., Van Erp, J., & Gyi, D. (2004). Design and emotion. CRC Press.
Miettinen S., Simo, J., Rontti S. J., & Jeminen J. (2014). Co-prototyping emotional value. In E. Bohemia, A. Rieple, J. Liedtka, & R. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th DMI International Design Management Research Conference: Design Management in an Era of Disruption (pp. 1228–1246). Design Management Institute.
Ries, H. & Neporent, L. (2018). The Empathy Effect: seven neuroscience-based keys for transforming the way we live, love, work, and connect across differences. Sounds True
Soto, M., Beaulé, C., & Miettinen, S. (2021). The flow of emotions in co-creation [Paper presentation]. Cumulus Conference 2021, Rome, Italy.
Soto, M., Beaulé, C., Alhonsuo, M., & Miettinen, S. (2020a). Emotions: The invisible aspect of co-creation workshops. In J.-F. Boujut, G. Cascini, S. Ahmed-Kristensen, G. V. Georgiev, & N. Iivari (Eds.), Proceedings of The Sixth International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2020) (pp. 192–198). The Design Society.
Mariluz Soto is a researcher and professor at Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile) member of the Service Design Research group at the University of Lapland. Her topics of interest are service design, co-creation, emotions, well-being, and transdisciplinary exploration that opens new perspectives for design research and practice. ORCID NUMBER: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3389-822X
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